You Can't Read Minds
Metafilter commenter grumblebee explains why not to assume you have infallible intuition about the thoughts of others. I am copying it here.
_I used to be a "psychic" armchair psychologist. I KNEW what people were thinking -- or at least thought I did. I prided myself on how good I was at it. I used to hold court by summing people up in a pithy, entertaining way. A guy would say, "I hate that movie," and I and would say, "of course, he really likes it, but is ashamed to say so." If someone asked me how I knew, I would say, "Oh come ON. It's obvious." And I really believed this. On the negative side, I also "knew" when people disliked me, even when they claimed otherwise.
All of this is strange, because I'm otherwise devoted to the Scientific Method -- and these observations were ANYTHING but scientific. They were gut feelings -- which had some probability of being correct, because I AM good at reading non-verbal signs -- but I had decided they were DEFINITELY correct. Gospel. Based on flimsy, totally subjective evidence.
Then one day the tables got turned. A friend accused me of thinking something negative about him that I didn't think. I tried to tell him he was wrong, but he just KNEW he was right, and he was really angry at me about it. I pleaded with him: "You can't know what I'm thinking," I said. "Oh come ON!" he replied. "I KNOW. It's OBVIOUS!" Nothing I said could convince him otherwise. I felt completely trapped. And I lost him as a friend.
After that, I vowed to change. I realized that I'd treated many people exactly the same way he'd treated me. I had been sure I was right -- and maybe I was. But so was he. And he was WRONG. The thing is, I could see his reasoning. If I had been him, I would have made the same assumption. But still, it WAS wrong. He assumed he could read my mind, and that was his mistake and my misfortune.
Here's what I learned: you CAN'T read other people's minds. You DON'T have psychic powers. You may -- like me -- have very good hunches. But that's all they are. Hunches.
I decided they were unhealthy, and I gave them up. This was VERY hard, because -- as I said -- they were a matter of pride. It did help me do re-devote myself to the Scientific Method. I refuse to believe anything without some sort of external evidence. Something is NOT true just because it FEELS true. (Which is not to say I devalue my feelings. I think feelings are really important. But they're indicative of something going on in ME -- not necessarily something in the outside world.)
Now my motto is "Give everyone the benefit of the doubt." If I get a hunch, I either have to confront someone about it or give it up. By "confronting someone," I mean that I have to admit to having a FEELING and ASK if it's based on reality. "I feel like you're mad at me. Are you?"
If the person says, "No," I must accept it. It's not fair to him to say, "I know you are!" I DON'T know. Only HE has access to his own thoughts.
I'm sure there are limits to this. I'm not a masochist. I won't continue to hang out with someone who continually throws non-verbal aggression my way. But the key word there is "continually." To my surprise, I discovered that when I gave up being "psychic", most the the continual stuff -- or my perception that there WAS continual stuff -- just stopped. I realized that I had mostly based my analysis on ONE event. Someone might just have been having a bad day -- might have been a bit pissy or something -- and I had built an entire edifice on it.
All of this has made me a kinder, more tolerant person, and I wouldn't go back for the world. But I'll be honest and say that there have been some drawbacks. Besides having to give up my social-status as "Dr. Freud," I've become less fun in catty conversations. A group of friends will all decide that Amy is Jealous and will want me to play along. I can't. The best I can say is, "She might be." Or "I can see why you think that." That's not fun. So people quickly learn to leave me out of those games. It also sometimes earns me a reputation of being naive. If you're not willing to say, "Oh come ON! It's OBVIOUS. Just look at the expression on her FACE!" then you obviously don't GET it.
But the worst thing is seeing other people do it. People do it all the time. They read each others minds; they read my mind. I hate it. And I now see how often it leads to needless pain. And once someone gets a psychological profile in their head, it's impossible to get it out of their heads. "How can you know?" "Oh come ON!"
The classic example is A deciding B is thinking bad thoughts and deciding it in an unfalsifiable way. If B claims A's interpretation is wrong, A counter-claims that B is lying or in denial. Beware of that. A good scientist NEVER makes an unfalsifiable claim.
I see it here on Metafilter every day. Someone posts something, and a zillion little Freuds just "KNOW" what he REALLY means. I hate, hate, HATE it. But I refuse to give into it. I also hate being holier-than-thou. So I don't lecture people about it. It wouldn't do any good, anyway. The best I can do is live MY life well.
I also notice my wife doing it all the time. She sounds like you. Someone will say one tiny thing to her, and she'll decide it's an insult. I DO try -- gently -- to point out that she doesn't have enough evidence to decide that.
_
One thing I've learned by observing her and myself: if you give up snap judgements, you have to live in a world of uncertainty. The positive of snap judgements is that you always have a clear picture of the world. It may be wrong, but it's clear. I think that's much more important to my wife than it is to me. It USED to be important to me. I valued clarity over accuracy. Now I've become okay with, "I don't know." Gradually, I've even become comfortable with, "I may never know." Did George just insult me? "I can't know, and I may never know. So I guess I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he didn't."
Life is better without the company of those who are adamantly certain they have Superpower Social Skills. We all have valuable hunches, but that's all they are. Hunches. Probabilities. It's healthy to remind them of that from time to time.
Comments
rachelann1977 on May. 21, 2009 6:10 PM
I think this is less armchair psychology when people do this than it is ego defense. It's armchair psychology for me to call this behavior ego defense.
Why do people insist on confusing psychologists with psychics? Counselor Troy was hot and all, but she is still not the paradigm...... :-p
Having said that, I, for one, try really hard not to do this, because my poor bruised ego sends out defense mechanisms often before I really know what's happening. It's a difficult thing to accomplish, but always worth the effort when I know I have prevented myself from doing something silly and often unnecessarily harmful.
atropis on May. 22, 2009 2:37 PM
i agree about this topic being more about ego defense than armchair psychology.
it's a strange question, with tangential threads. on the other side of that is when there is an 'is this the case' conversation, a formal denial, and then the dismissive action takes place anyhow. if it wasn't in progress at the time, that may have been only a technicality rather than an accurate report of what was going on.
the denial seems also to be an ego defense, because of whatever people want to believe about themselves or what they want you to believe about them.
on the other side of the coin is the perceiver's brains, and what signals it's sending out. currently, i'm personally in the kind of paranoid mood that sees all non-self entities as vaguely hostile, and as an automatic response sends out nonspecific hostile signals of my own. these perpetuate any cycles that may or may not already be there. also, they're not especially controllable. it's like losing one's balance, knowing that's the case, and still not having a way to counteract the gravitational field.
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